Thanks to the generosity of my folks, I’ll be reading the following books. If you were planning (or want to) read them as well, click on the images below.

My parents are downstairs watching basktetball, my brother will arrive here tonight around 8PM, I’m wrapping a gift for my wife, and my coffee downstairs is getting cold.

My good friend Micah finally started a blog. He is the CEO of my company, VelocIT, which makes him a business partner as well as a friend.

As I recently said, you have to be a bit MacGuyver to be a successful consultant. I’ve also whined about how difficult hiring is, especially when you want to hire MacGuyver. But then there are times where you work with someone who makes MacGuyver look positively clueless.

I’ve learned a valuable lesson recently. To be successful as a technology consultant, it isn’t enough to just be able to hit the high notes. You’ve gotta be able to hit the middle notes too. You have to channel a bit of MacGuyver inside.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee starts a blog and it’s a veritable love fest in his comments section.

Hiring good developers is challenging. There’s a small bit of science and a lot of art. Even when a hire is brilliant, he or she might not work out. When hiring, you don’t just want a list of experiences, technologies and languages… You want a person who exemplifies being a self-starter (rather than just listing it as a buzzword on the resumé) who is also smart and can get things done. You’re hiring a personality as much as a liste of skills and experiences.

Just browsing around and saw this video of the most amazing soccer juggling skills ever. Yes, that is a screenshot of the guy jump-roping while juggling a soccer ball on his head.

Windows OneCare Live Beta reports that TestDriven.NET is a virus. Anyone else run into that?

Men who engage in online relationships in chatrooms and such are constantly suspicious that the person on the other end is not who they say they are. Often the vision of another middle-aged man looking for action is envisioned. That would’ve been a welcome relief for the guy in this news story.

If Joel can do it with FogBugz, I can try and do it with my blog. That “it” being to post a picture of the day.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice this when he first published it (I only saw an internal email on it), but Steve Harman wrote this excellent guide to branching with CVS, complete with an easy to follow diagram.

In this post, I plan to give out some rough code I hope you find useful. But first, an introduction. Occasionally, in the search to compress more into less space, web designers will create a form in which the text inputs double as labels. For example, this is a login control I wrote for a recent project.

This morning I woke up with visions of sugar code dancing in my head. It is a coding day and I was ready to sling it, only to be bowled over in stomach pain. Not sure what it was, but it was very unpleasant and wasn’t accompanied by any other symptoms like gas or otherwise.

These days I tend to find the holidays more a burden than something to look forward to. However with my family visiting us this year, I am quite excited. Maybe I’ll put up some lights like this display. The screenshot doesn’t do the video justice. It has to be seen.

One common objection I hear to TDD and writing unit tests is that it creates a lot of extra work to develop software. And this is true, but it does not give a complete picture. TDD and writing and maintaining unit tests do take discipline and do increase the time (thus cost) of writing code. No doubt about it. However, this cost reflects the true cost of writing quality code and lowers the total cost of developing and maintaining software.

Wesner writes that a couple of readers criticized him for his desire to aspire for greatness. Well obviously Wesner, you should aspire for mediocrity! In any case, one reader comments,

In his post Unit tests are the new documentation Scott sees unit tests as an undue burden much like documentation. Documentation, typically written after the fact, inevitably falls sway to the laws of entropy and becomes hopelessly outdated.

Sam Gentile is preaching and I am in the choir. I’ve talked about the benefits of unit testing and refactoring in the past, but Sam makes this great point.